Merchants, such as grocers, car services, dry cleaning services, etc., provide their products and services to consumers. Such merchants often employ agents to deliver their products and/or provide the actual services. For example, a person acting on the merchant's behalf will drive a consumer in their own car, deliver food ordered through a merchant website, pick up and/or drop off clothes dry cleaned by the merchant, etc.
These merchants, although providing a system for supplying products and/or services to consumers through their agents, often do not perform the financial processing associated with the merchant transactions. Instead, merchants utilize commerce systems to process financial transactions for the products and/or services provided to consumers through their agents. This may include the agent establishing an account with the merchant and then establishing an account with the commerce system. Once the accounts are established, the agent can accept payments from customers of the merchant for provided products and/or services, and the commerce system processes the accepted payments. This processing may include running credit cards, crediting a merchant account for the transaction, crediting the agent responsible for the transaction, debiting a commerce system fee for processing the transaction on behalf of the merchant, as well as performing other commerce related transactions for the merchant and/or agent such as providing payouts for products/services rendered on behalf of a merchant.
One significant problem with the above described process of performing transactions for a merchant through an agent includes verifying the identities of the agents and/or devices that the agent uses during transactions with the consumers. That is, since financial and/or other sensitive consumer information may be handled by the agent of the merchant, it is very important that the identity of the agent be established, and that the device the agent uses to process merchant transactions is the actual device associated with the agent providing the merchant products/services.